The spinning spacecraft, which uses a spent upper stage to counterbalance its crew module and features a stationery utility node at the center, certainly looks impressive all the more so with the knowledge that it’s based on sound principles. While naturally some artistic license was used, is excited by what he’s seen so far.

So they reached out to, who in turn used KSP to throw together a rough idea of how such a ship might work in the real-world.Īs you can see in the video below, the CGI spacecraft shown in the film’s recently released trailer ended up bearing a strong resemblance to its KSP prototype. The only problem was, they weren’t sure what that would actually look like. The writers of Stowaway wanted their film to take place on a Mars cycler, and to avoid having to create the illusion of weightlessness, they wanted their fictional craft to also have some kind of artificial gravity. An early KSP proof of concept for Stowaway.

It’s worth noting that a similar cycler orbit should be possible for Earth-Venus trips, but nobody really wants to go there. The concept can be thought of as a sort of interplanetary train: where passengers and cargo are picked up and dropped off at “stations” above Earth and Mars. The spacecraft couldn’t actually stop at either planet, but while it made a close pass, smaller craft could rendezvous with it to hitch a ride. Put simply, it describes an orbit that would allow a vehicle to travel continuously between Earth and Mars while needing only an occasional engine burn for course corrections. The Mars cycler concept was proposed in 1985 by Buzz Aldrin as a way to establish a long-term human presence on the Red Planet.

It turns out he used his virtual rocket building skills to help the creators of Netflix’s Stowaway develop a realistic portrayal of a crewed spacecraft in a Mars cycler orbit. But as revealed in one of his recent videos, YouTube isn’t the only place where his KSP craft can be found these days. Fans of the lusciously voiced space aficionado will know he often uses Kerbal Space Program (KSP) in his videos to knock together simple demonstrations of blindingly complex topics such as orbital mechanics.

Ksp mac crew report